Listen to the hive before opening it.
A visit can reveal how a bee colony is doing, but opening the hive also disturbs it. BeeAndMe gives the beekeeper another source of information between visits.
ME MontenegroIn practice. Founded by engineers from Montenegro and developed across Montenegro and Austria. Vienna documented a rooftop deployment in 2017; the company continues to offer connected hive monitoring.
What to keep in view
Sensors need reliable calibration, power and communication. Monitoring does not replace beekeeping expertise, and these sources do not establish a measured reduction in colony losses.
Measure what an occasional visit misses
Elma Hot and Alija Dervic developed BeeAndMe to monitor conditions in and around a hive. Weight, temperature, humidity and sound can tell a beekeeper when something deserves attention. The system sends measurements remotely and makes them available through an app, so observation does not always begin with opening the hive.
The City of Vienna documented a 2017 deployment at the Seestadt technology centre as the Montenegrin startup moved to Vienna. The current company describes a commercial monitoring system with hive scales, sensors and a web portal. These are two stages of the project, not evidence that every early feature remains unchanged.
Make the next visit better informed
Our reading: the useful change is a better decision about when and where to intervene. A time series can reveal a change that a single inspection would miss. A notification is still an invitation to investigate, not a diagnosis of the colony.
This is a cross-border European case: its founders’ Montenegrin origin and Austrian development both belong in the story. Counting it under Montenegro should make that connection visible rather than imply that the whole operation is based there.
Read next.
Read the field as a set of different places.
Both turn observations into a reason to inspect more carefully. A field map and a hive sensor leave important decisions with the person on the ground.
Let the snow groomer measure as it moves.
Both add a measurement between direct inspections. Compare a moving groomer mapping a slope with sensors following a colony over time.